Being a woman means one experiences certain milestones — puberty, periods, sex education, one’s first visit with an OBGYN, birth control. It’s pretty typical, I’d say, for these moments to be surrounded by support from women in your family. Growing up, that person for me was my father.
In my household, my father, a women’s healthcare provider, is the expert on women’s health. Up until the divisive 2016 election, I lived a life where a male figure, my father, was the main educator and champion of my bodily rights.
The American agenda against abortion — which is disproportionately driven by men — is a complete antithesis to the reproductive values that my father instilled in me.
Our current president claims that his pro-life work is protecting abortion on the very extremes, and therefore protecting society from those he deems “demented late-term abortionists” who “execut[e] babies after birth.” This inflammatory language, meant to confound voters with ethical quandaries, is another example of pro-life fear-mongering. These edge cases that pro-lifers mention — abortions after 21 weeks — falsely villainize women and make up less than one percent of all abortions.
Trump has changed what reproductive healthcare looks like for me, countless other women and those with female anatomy. All of his nominations to the Supreme Court during his first term — Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett — voted in favor of the 6-3 decision overturning Roe v. Wade in 2022. Although Biden was in office in 2022, the reversal of Roe v. Wade during his presidency was planned — in 2016, Trump promised to build a court with enough of a majority to do so.
After the Supreme Court decision in 2022, women in increasingly hostile abortion climates resorted to desperate measures. In a UCSF survey study, the number of participants who used the anti-abortion medication mifepristone without the help of a medical provider doubled from 2022 to 2023. Moreover, since the overturning of Roe v. Wade, there’s been an increase in clinically-supplemented abortions — especially ones administered virtually through telehealth, which suggests that women are feeling less safe when accessing abortions outside of their own homes.
The current administration has limited access to abortion even further by wielding the power of the executive. Amidst his return to the White House, Trump enacted the Hyde Amendment, which prohibits national health insurance agencies such as Medicaid from using government funding for abortions. In late January, Trump also weaponized the State Department to forego Congressional support of family planning programs in underdeveloped countries. The legacy of this decision means that 47 million women in developing countries will lose access to contraceptive care, including abortions.
In many ways, Trump’s incendiary remarks and executive actions make him a martyr for the modern day pro-life movement. What some people tend to forget, however, is that pro-life sentiments have always existed.
For example, the 1973 Roe v. Wade Supreme Court case was highly controversial. The ruling, which determined that the government could not interfere with a woman’s decision to terminate before 24-28 weeks, incited protests immediately after. The recent overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022, Dobbs v. Jackson, has also been a subject of discourse. In states with total bans, around 67% of women believe that abortion should remain legal in the majority of instances, meaning that the Supreme Court’s ruling is not, in fact, a genuine exercise of “state’s choice,” especially when it comes down to the opinions of the actual individuals who will be affected. Regardless of these statistics, there are still many politicians and citizens cheering pro-life agendas on. Surprisingly, some of them are women.
From 2008 to 2017, 45% of anti-abortion legislation was sponsored by Republican women. In 2020, 16 pro-life female politicians were elected to Senate positions. These politicians are still active in office; in fact, their terms end in 2026, which provides plenty of time for them to work alongside an increasingly conservative Capitol Hill. Moreover, within the electorate, over a third of women believe most abortions should be illegal. It’s clear from data that endangering abortion rights isn’t solely perpetuated by men, but also by women, many of whom are religious.
How, then, do we grapple with the multi-gendered issue of abortion? In today’s political arena, Democrats and Republicans exploit this issue through their political platforms to amass emotionally-charged reactions and garner the women’s vote. Where the political debate often strays away from, however, is the women themselves.
As voters, it’s easier to disassociate from and dehumanize issues by focusing on the masses and the eye-catching statistics surrounding abortion. However, my belief in reproductive choice for women is through my father’s eyes. For him, every case is different. Each woman brings their own reasons, religions, political ideology and upbringing into his clinic. There’s no conscionable way for him to amalgamate his patients into an ambiguous mass.
That’s the way we should think about abortion and reproductive healthcare — as an incredibly private decision that should, but does not, stay between our bodies, partners and the doors of our OBGYN offices. The reversal of Roe v. Wade was just the beginning of a series of rollbacks to our rights, rights that will soon be entrusted to states as an assertive executive, Supreme Court and Congress facilitate this transfer of power in the next few years. As this happens, the privacy that we cherish as citizens will be knocked down in favor of a partisan political agenda.
Ultimately, privacy is about choice. The freedom to make informed decisions in society without government interference is an inherently democratic value. At the end of the day, you don’t have to be a woman to care about abortion rights. You just have to care about democracy and your right to choose within it.